MSCA-Fellow (2023–2026)

Pavel Horák is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow (2023–2026) at the University of Vienna's Department of Religious Studies and a junior researcher at the Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, where he previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow (2019–2021). He holds a Ph.D. (2018), an M.A. (2013) and a B.A. (2011) in Religious Studies, all from the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. He conducted several short-term research fellowships at Ghent University, Belgium (2018); The Center for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents, University of Amsterdam; the Rittman Library, Amsterdam (2019); the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Vienna (2021); and the University of Cambridge's Department of Social Anthropology (2022). In his doctoral and postdoctoral research, Dr. Horák focused on modern Paganism. He published widely on the subject in international journals and presently works on an English and Czech monograph. In 2023, The Czech Academy of Sciences awarded him the Otto Wichterle Award for talented researchers under 35 years. The same year, he received the Jan Hus Educational Foundation Stipend for his research on modern Paganism. As an MSCA Fellow at the Department of Religious Studies, Dr. Horák will work on his new research project on the entanglement of esotericism and politics in central Europe, 1890–1945. More informations about this project can be found here.